Rather than give you a March Madness preview, or even a European soccer article which I’ve desperately wanted to write since I started scribbling on this back page for The Siskiyou paper, I’m saddened to tell you readers that this is in fact my last article and officially my retirement.
Not to steal any limelight from Brett Favre’s recent exiting, but instead of lingering around past my prime, like many historic professional boxing greats (i.e. Evander Holyfield), I’ve decided to hang em up and pursue my true passion of becoming a reality TV script writer with my first project titled, "The Surreal Life: Product Label Mascots." I hear you snickering, but just imagine a house where Stubbs (from Stubbs BBQ sauce) quarrels with Quaker William Penn (from Quaker Oats) over the love of Mrs. Butterworth; meanwhile, you have Senor Tapatio in the hot tub with Senorita Cholula—gold, I tell you!
Before I leave you, I feel like I have some loose ends that need to be tied up from previous articles that the very few of you may have wondered about. First and foremost, you remember my NASCAR fan aspirations? Well, let’s just say that didn’t turn out too well. Between the Brooks and Dunn intro performance of Daytona followed by the pre-race prayer, it was quite difficult to keep my TV tuned into the race for any great amount of time.
Don’t get me wrong, a NASCAR event looks like one awesome spectator experience full of cooler hopping and saying, "What? I can’t hear you!" repeatedly. I just can’t understand why people enjoy watching guys dressed in glorified pajamas race around a giant oval where every time someone gets "loose," the caution flag appears and forces the play by play announcers to actually come up with some kind of insightful information, which usually fails. Additionally, following my fantasy golf team is much more important to me on Sundays, and I can always time out the last few laps of the race by simply using one of my greatest skills: channel surfing.
Stretching back into the archives, I apologize to all my readers for giving you a pretty lame World Series prediction. I predicted the D’Backs to face the Indians in the World Series, where both ball clubs got annihilated in each respective Championship Series. So if any of you took that prediction, or my Thanksgiving Day football games predictions, I’m sorry, and I hope you didn’t lose too much scrilla at Seven Feathers on my behalf. This is why I choose not to gamble on sporting events. I quickly realized that I cannot predict any outcome of a sporting contest during freshman year when my dorm room desk was littered with failed crumpled sports action tickets outnumbering any of my school related material.
As you probably could tell, I’m a Lakers fan, and yes, I was in attendance this last Laker vs. Blazer contest in Portland. I wanted to write an article on this, but it has taken me until now to be able to reasonably express my feelings about this experience. This wasn’t the first Lakers loss I’ve been to in Portland, but it was certainly the most painful.
The Portland franchise and myself have quite a long history which stems back to Jan. 15, of the 1992-1993 Lakers’ season, when Clifford Robinson hit the game winning three pointer as time expired, leaving the Great Western Forum fans speechless and myself in tears (hey, I was 9-years-old at the time). Since that moment I’ve had the utmost distaste for the Trail Blazers, but as I’ve matured over the years, I can sit side by side with Blazer fans—and nearly 98 percent of my circle of friends are Blazer fans—so nothing is new to me by now. I had been awaiting that game all season though, and I even purchased a Pau Gasol jersey T-shirt. All I have to say is the better team won that night, and I can still hear the "Beat L.A.!" chants in my head from time to time.
Some would say it is absolutely pointless to follow sports to the degree where you can spout off the statistics of any given season or list the starting lineup of any franchise in any given sport. Now I agree it is a bit extreme if you pride yourself on these abilities, but what I do think is that sports are still a valuable form of entertainment and a way to take a break from today’s world which is ruled by the worry of credit card debts and test scores.
The fact that you can sit and watch any sporting contest, or participate (which is even more beneficial regarding the physical reward of it), I think that having a passion for watching and/or playing sports is one of the greatest ways to add balance to your life by taking your focus off of things that may be dragging you down a bit. Here is the best part: in sports there is always next season! As a New York Jets fan, I have learned to live by this motto. One final note, sports also brings you back to the moment. You’re in the present moment, not worried about the future and not dwelling on the past (unless you can’t get over a certain call from the ref), and that to me is the most beneficial aspect of sports.
I’d like to say thanks to everyone at The Siskiyou paper for allowing me this opportunity to blab about sports, and I know there is some guy or gal (who surely has a better mug shot than mine) out there at SOU who is eagerly awaiting the chance to do exactly what I have done the past two terms, and that is to riff about sports and to have fun in the process.